I strode through Covent Garden and replayed the meeting in my mind. Minka would have a coronary if she knew I turned down a vampire. She’d worry about repercussions for the banner if he decided to file a complaint. We didn’t want to court the negative attention of vampires. They could make life very difficult for a small operation like ours. We could lose our license to use magic, which would render us useless and unemployed. My infrequent meals would become even more so. Still, better hungry than dead.
Halfway through Covent Garden I passed one of the largest memorials in the city. A team of artists had created a ring of ten volcanoes to commemorate the Great Eruption. Each one was identified by a small plaque. La Garita Caldera that spanned Colorado, Utah, and Nevada in the United States. Lake Toba in North Sumatra. Cerro Guacha, a Miocene caldera in southwestern Bolivia. Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming in the United States. Lake Taupo on what was once the North Island of New Zealand. Cerro Galán in Argentina. Island Park Caldera, one of the world’s largest calderas that crossed the borders of Idaho and Wyoming in the United States. Vilama, the Miocene caldera in Bolivia and Argentina. La Pacana, the Miocene age caldera in Chile. Pastos Grandes, the caldera and crater lake in Bolivia. Scientists had reassured people for decades that they had nothing to fear from the supervolcanoes.
Scientists were wrong.
Not that there was much they could’ve done to prevent the aftermath. Once the cloud of ash expanded to coat the earth’s atmosphere, there was a period of death and destruction as the world struggled to adjust to the new normal. The vampires saw their opportunity and seized it with both fangs. They took control, using witches and wizards to create a magical infrastructure that kept plants alive and stopped mass extinction. They had an ulterior motive, of course. With human blood as their primary food source, they were desperate to preserve it. To do that successfully, they had to keep the human population fed and thriving, hence the use of electricity to replicate day and night, among other things. Apparently humans tasted better when they weren’t in a constant state of distress. I preferred not to think about it in greater detail.
I noticed someone had vandalized the memorial of Vilama by writing ‘freedom’ in yellow spray paint. I wasn’t sure I agreed with the sentiment. Yes, South America was one continent the vampires failed to control, but only because they abandoned it to the monsters. The vampires in North America employed a team of wizards and witches that worked around the clock to provide a line of defense at the southern and western borders. European and Asian Houses were able to accumulate more power because they didn’t have to expend their energy defending their borders from an entire continent of monsters or repairing mass destruction. There’d been other kinds of destruction as a result of the Eternal Night, but not on the scale of what the Americas and Australasia had faced. Places like New Zealand and Indonesia no longer existed, claimed by lava. One of the benefits of Lake Taupo’s location, though, was that most of the monsters that emerged from that caldera failed to survive. Unless they could swim or fly, they were doomed from the moment they were spat into the realm.
I made a pitstop at the twenty-four-hour bakery and continued to Tavistock Street where the Knights of the First Order enjoyed a refurbished period property with meeting rooms and individual offices. Two columns flanked the doorway and over the entrance was a carving of the sun. Both the carving itself and its subject were remnants of the past. There were still those who remembered sunlight, although their numbers dwindled year after year. Witches and wizards enjoyed longer lifespans than most, but many of them worked themselves to the breaking point as a key part of the vampires’ infrastructure. Shapeshifters lived longer under ideal circumstances, but their need for massive quantities of food meant they didn’t often live to their full potential unless they were part of a powerful pack. The thriving packs tended to be those that struck deals with vampires and offered their brute strength in areas like security, building, and agriculture.
I stopped at the door to greet the security guard, Lawrence.
“Anything in that bag for me?” he asked.
I gave him the bag from the bakery. “You know my mother raised me right. Is he in?”
“Where else would he be?”
I ticked off the options on my fingers. “Home with his wife. Working in the field. Trapped under a well-fed manticore.”
Lawrence chuckled. “Go ahead up.”
I crossed the threshold and took a moment to admire the few period features that had been retained. The brass light fixtures were a smart choice. Thanks to my mother, I knew that brass was easy to maintain and worth preserving, not a fact that many building owners seemed to know. She’d impressed upon me the importance of history. No matter how long ago and inconsequential a story or a detail seemed, there was always the potential to learn from it. I once complained about having to memorize passages about the Boston Tea Party in the United States. What could someone in Britannia City hope to gain from a story about angry human colonists dumping tea into a harbor an ocean away as an act of rebellion? My mother told me to pretend King George III was a vampire and then decide how irrelevant it was. I saw her point. It was also heartening to learn the colonists eventually won their war. I chose to ignore the fact that their victory was short-lived in the grand scheme of the universe. Hope, like the night, was eternal.
I took the staircase to the second floor. Very few knights would be here now. Knights of the First Order worked what some referred to as ‘bank hours.’ Not Mack. He was a workaholic. Probably one of the reasons we got along.
Well, we weren’t going to get along tonight. I was too pissed off. By the time I arrived at his office, I’d worked myself into a fury.